


The Morrigan's Garden

by LayALioness



Series: Stories of Mine (myths, re-imagined) [10]
Category: Irish Mythology
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 13:52:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5458811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LayALioness/pseuds/LayALioness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Morrigan finds another hero in her woods.</p><p>"I've come to kill the beast," he says.</p><p>"Get in line."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Morrigan's Garden

The Morrigan thought everyone knew not to walk in the forest alone. Everyone except her--but she’d been raised in these trees, and lived here her whole life. She’d long since accepted she was going to die here, too. It seemed fitting.

But the stranger in front of her is not from the forest, and clearly not from the nearby village, either. Those people sometimes came to her cabin, always in pairs or small packs, like lions, or trying to be. They would pay for their love spells or their small hexes or their herbal teas made from the plants in her garden that didn’t grow anywhere else. They thought the soil in her ground was magic, and the Morrigan never bothered to correct them. She never really cared; money was money, and anyway she liked the work. 

She liked the feel of crushed hyacinth and rosebud and dragonsbane in her hands and under the soles of her feet and in the spaces between her teeth. She liked the prayers, the lullabies she sang into her potions--not because they did much, but because the music calmed her soul.

She liked the silence of her forest, even with all its noise. The noise of life, birds rustling branches and foxes scattering leaves and does with their young licking the salt off the soft earth. The sounds of her forest were different from the sounds of the cities, and even the village, small as it may be. 

Crowds, for the most part, tend to just draw more people and people, she’s learned, are usually idiotic. Best to just stick to herself and her garden.

The Morrigan has two sisters, triplets, that she sees every now and again when they decide to stop by. It doesn’t happen often, which is probably for the best--Macha is too busy with her horse track, while Nemain fights men in a desert. They still write each other; Macha sends sensible postcards, while Nemain sends carrier crows because she has a flair for the dramatic. The Morrigan tries to get care packages to them each month--robin eggshells for luck and dried rosemary for incense and herbal teas to clear their heads. Nemain sends back the sand that gets caught in her boots, dyed red from the blood of the people she’s killed, and the warm empty shells of spent bullets. Macha sends Amazon gift cards.

When they were girls growing up in the forest, their mother used to call them her  _little nightmares_. The village children used to hide when they saw them in the street. Store owners would pretend to be closed, as they walked by, neon signs blinking out with each step they took. The sisters never minded; they had each other, and the trees, and the crows. There was a family of ravens that nested in the maple just outside their house, and they used to put presents in the branches for them, until the birds knew them by voice, and would come perch on their arms when they called them. 

They used to braid briers and rose stems thick with thorns through their hair, like crowns sharp enough to bite. They used to gorge themselves on wild berries, until their mouths were wet and stained jet black, and their mother was sure they’d been poisoned.

They found the ravens cracked open and dead one morning, when they ran out calling and the birds never came. There were maggots wriggling around in their eye sockets, and paw prints in the red dirt around them. Nemain had hunted down the bobcat with the saw they used to cut firewood. They ate the meat for a week. Macha dug the graves with their mother’s trowel, and buried them in the yard. 

A rose bush sprouted from the spot within a year, and the Morrigan was the one to tend to it, wondering if the thick red of the petals came straight from their blood.

There were three beasts back then, each more terrible than the last, roaming the woods with howls and snarls and claws raking the earth like a scar. Now there’s just the one, but it’s more than enough, and most people know not to be caught alone in the forest.

The forest had never betrayed the Morrigan; she can feel each breath it takes, through the bark of the trees and the moss staining her toes green. It’s steady and even, unafraid, and so is she as she takes in the stranger.

He’s handsome, and very clearly lost, holding a road map in his hand that will make absolutely no difference, in these woods. The forest probably isn’t even marked on it.

He sees her suddenly, and she can tell when because all at once he’s stuffing the map into his bag, looking concerned and a little curious, and she can read him so easily it’s almost a shame.

 _Ah_ , she thinks dryly.  _A hero, how nice_.

She’s had her fair share of knights in shining armor stomping through her trees, searching for a dragon to kill or a maiden to rescue. Sometimes they think she’s the dragon, but mostly they think she’s the one that they need to save, and it’s all equally irritating, and a bit of a drag. 

“You shouldn’t be here,” she says, and the stranger steps forward, cautious, like he’s afraid he might scare her. Or maybe he’s afraid  _of_  her, it’s hard to tell.

“I could say the same for you,” he says, taking in her dress, plain and mist gray, her bare feet, her hair falling back in pale tangles. The fine dust coating her skin like freckles, like it belongs there. He can probably tell she fits in between these trees like she’s one of them, and if he can’t, well. 

Most people are idiots. She wouldn’t be surprised.

“I live here,” she says, eyeing him up and down. He’s definitely a hero, no doubt about it, but he’s not the usual kind. Where most knights she’s seen are broad and all-encompassing, overshadowing everything within view, this one is slight and plain-looking, like he’d be just as comfortable with his nose in a book in some overstuffed library.

“Alright,” she decides, shrugging her deer leather bag tighter on her shoulder. “You can stay in my spare room. I’ll walk you back to the village in the morning--if you’re out here any longer, the beast will sniff you out.”

“That’s why I’m here,” he says, just like she knew he would. Heroes, she’s discovered, are really a dime a dozen. They’re all on some quest that involves killing a thing that they don’t understand. Even the plain-faced library ones. “I have to kill it.”

“You don’t  _have_  to do anything,” the Morrigan says, and the hero frowns, but he follows her down the path, anyway. The sun isn’t exactly  _low_  in the sky, but it’s  _lower,_ and apparently even he knows better than to try and slay the beast in the dark.

“It’s hurting people,” he says, and she shrugs.

“People hurt people. Cars hurt people. Rivers hurt people. Hurt’s impossible to avoid, or stop.”

“You can still try though,” he says, quiet. The Morrigan can’t remember the last time she believed in anything as strongly as he seems to believe in his quest. She’s almost jealous. “You can try to make the world a little bit better.”

“The world’s fucked,” she says, and pushes the front door open. She never locks the cabin because she’s never needed to. Anyone who knows their way around these woods knows to leave the Morrigan’s home alone, and anyone who doesn’t know their way around, can’t find it.

“You can’t believe that,” the hero says, setting his bag down with a sigh. It hits the ground hard, heavy. She wonders how long he’s been carrying it, searching through the trees for a beast he doesn’t know the name of, doesn’t even know what it looks like, probably. Almost nobody does, and the stories are all different, because no one who’s actually  _seen_  the beast has lived.

“I can and I do,” she says, firm, placing her own bag in the corner, rifling through her cupboards for two mugs and a spoon. “Tea?”

“Please,” he sighs, slipping into the chair like it’s habit, rubbing at the ache in his shoulder. “How long have you lived here?” He doesn’t sound suspicious, or nervous, or like that reporter that showed up once, hoping to interview her for some National Geographic documentary about Wicca. Mostly, he just sounds honest, like he actually wants to know. Like he wants to get to know her.

“Forever.” The Morrigan fills the kettle with water and lights the stove with a match. She fetches one of the glass jars of powder, her own specialty tea, made from the herbs grown outside. She puts a healthy spoonful in each cup, and then waits for the water to boil. “I grew up here. It’s my home.”

“And you’re not scared of the beast?”

“The beast doesn’t bother me,” she says, placing his steaming drink on the table before him. It’s a dirty red color, and smells like spices. He breathes in deep, and she watches all of his muscles relax beneath his shirt.

“Maybe you’re special,” he says, smiling softly, taking a tentative sip of the tea, and the Morrigan holds her breath for a moment because--he really believes that.

“I’m no one,” she says, and watches him finish his drink, eager even though it  _has_  to be scalding. He licks every drop from the rim of the cup and then tips it over his mouth to get what’s left, desperate and  _hungry_ , breathing heavy and harsh.

There’s a moment of clarity once his cup is licked clean, and he stares up at her, the smallest bit of  _terror_  behind the glaze in his eyes. A little confusion, too, and the Morrigan sets her untouched tea down with a sigh. It’s still too hot for her to drink and anyway, she has something else to take care of, now. She’ll finish it later.

“Foxglove,” she says. “And a tiny bit of hemslock, for flavor. It’s relatively painless.” In the spirit of being honest, she adds “The next part won’t be.”

The hero is crying now--they always cry, around this time. Cry, and beg, and show her pictures of their children, of their families, saying  _it’s my birthday_ , or  _I won’t tell anyone, I swear!_

But this one doesn’t beg, or dig out old polaroids with the corners folded down by his pockets, and age. He doesn’t mention any holidays she’s never heard of. He just stares at her, tears thin and streaming down his cheeks, resigned. 

“Why?”

The Morrigan shrugs, thinks about the ravens, their necks snapped by a bobcat and then left to rot, because it wasn’t even hungry. It killed them for sport. Because it could. Because it wanted to.

“It’s in my nature,” she says, finally, but her voice is going hollow by now, like the rattling of water through old rusted pipes. She can feel the feathers sprouting from her irises, white and snowy. The fangs taking over her jaws, overcrowding and stretching and unhinging, tongue slipping out to taste the air. It smells like copper sweat and grief and fear, the scent heady and warm in her mouth.

She can feel her fingers elongating with extra joints, tapering off into points at the end, her legs shifting into haunches, bones snapping and twisting and reforming themselves like a puzzle. It’s muscle memory by now. It doesn’t even hurt. 

The Morrigan can’t see the hero by the time she’s transformed, but she can smell him, and she can hear him, and she can feel his scream when she tears into his throat.

She buries him out in her garden, with the others. It’s dark out by now, sun long since set, but she can see plenty. 

The rot of his blood will do wonders for her hydrangeas. This will be their best year, yet.


End file.
